I am Dmitriy Sidorov. I moved to New York when I was five years old from Chelyabinskaya Oblast, a region near the Ural Mountains in Russia. I knew no English and was immediately put into kindergarten, even though I was supposed to go to first grade (which is why I’m a year older than most people in my grade). I quickly picked up the language.
Through elementary and middle school, I made great friends from all different backgrounds — Dominicans, Puerto-Ricans, Cubans, Chinese, etc. I loved being invited for dinner at their houses, which let me see the different cultures firsthand. I loved Spanish, and went on vacation a couple of times to several cities in the Dominican Republic. I ended up taking the language for all four year of LaGuardia High School, where I went for guitar. One of my goals for college is to travel through Spain, and other spanish-speaking countries. After that, it’ll be time to wander with wonder the rest of the world.
I’m lucky to have moved here from Russia. Being surrounded by such a slew of different cultures made me appreciate them all. It helped me learn the ability to have a much broader and more powerful perspective about people. So talk to me — I’ll listen.
In college, I’m going to continue learning and exploring. I plan on following what one of the college advisors at Baruch said: Remain open to everything. I’m still not sure exactly what I want to do, simply because there are too many things I want to do. Whether it’s fueled by my attention-deficit tendencies or not, I love to learn about random things that pop into my mind throughout the day. At one point, I’ll look up how time travel is theoretically possible. At another, I’ll learn how MDMA acts on serotonin in the brain.
